Screwed up on GRE Writing

[joselito]

I am embarrassed that it has come to this, but I really need some anonymous advice. I took the GRE recently (still waiting for the official scores), and received a 169 in the Verbal and a 154 in the Quantitative component. As a Humanities guy who only spent 3-4 days preparing for the exam, I'm reasonably content with my performance in those two areas. Both are significantly (7 to 8 percentile points) above the reported averages for my top choice PhD program.

This is where my story takes a turn towards the tragic... Resulting from a certain digestive situation, I had to leave the exam room for 10-15 minutes during the Issue task for the Writing section. By the time I returned, I was unable to finish my response. The exam question explicitly asked to, at some point in my formulation, address potential criticisms of the argument.. Effectively, I was unable to follow instructions fully. That probably drops me to a 1, right? Is my situation completely hopeless? My other essay was decent, but judging from other posters, probably didn't reach a 6 level on the grading scale.

I have always prided myself on my analytical writing abilities, and as a result, did minimal prep work for the AW. Otherwise, I have a 4.0 from a very prestigious Ivy, 3 recommendations that attest to my writing ability, excellent sample/SOP... I mean will this atrocious performance on the writing invariably knock me out of contention for a PhD spot? It just seems insane that this will have such an impact on my future, but again such is life.

One of my recommenders (who has been a mentor to me) has very close connections to the faculty at my top choice program, and has even facillitated a meeting with prominent faculty members to help me chart out a plan of procuring funding from the school, etc. I told her about my screw up and she said we'd communicate with the schools if that became an issue. Is there any chance for me?

[sciencegirl]

You should be fine. I believe that they send your essay that you wrote on the GRE with your scores and the adcoms should see that you didn't finish vs. being a bad writer. Also, I would send an addendum to your app. explaining what happened to your GRE writing section. During the review process, they will look at your writing sample more and your addendum will be adequate explanation. Just draft a professional, brief letter explaining the situation - e-mail the department you are applying to, and gently request if you can have them add this letter to your file. I have a friend who had a comparatively low LSAT score and still was able to get into top ten law schools by writing an addendum explaining why the score was abnormally low compared to the rest of his app.

[joselito]

You should be fine. I believe that they send your essay that you wrote on the GRE with your scores and the adcoms should see that you didn't finish vs. being a bad writer. Also, I would send an addendum to your app. explaining what happened to your GRE writing section. During the review process, they will look at your writing sample more and your addendum will be adequate explanation. Just draft a professional, brief letter explaining the situation - e-mail the department you are applying to, and gently request if you can have them add this letter to your file. I have a friend who had a comparatively low LSAT score and still was able to get into top ten law schools by writing an addendum explaining why the score was abnormally low compared to the rest of his app.

I've heard about people sending in addendums for law school apps, but never for PhD programs in the humanities. If they see my responses (I heard some schools don't request them) I'm sure they'll be able to tell that I have strong writing ability, just was too rushed to adequately complete the task (I can't stand typing quickly or writing brief, irrelevant essays on random BS). Do you think an explanation, possibly with my mentor serving as the intermediary, to the adcomm at my top choice might allay any concerns about my low score? If for one of the prompts you don't fully respond to the directions are you basically assured a score of 1, regardless?

[Eigen]

Eh, even if you get a 1 and a 5, you'll still get a 3.5 average. I wouldn't worry too much about an average AW score, most adcoms really don't seem to pay that much attention to them. Wait to get the actual score, then see about adding an explanation/addendum, depending.

Since you're in the humanities, are you submitting writing samples with your application? If so, the adcoms will see a full sample of your writing, as well as what is presented in your SoP.

[joselito]

Just wanted to update this thread... i got my score back, it's a 4.0. I know that's pretty low, but the way I performed on the section, I feel like I got out of it relatively unscathed. Is a 4.0 score the type of thing I would need to explain to ad committees during the the review process?

[Eigen]

No, a 4.0 should be fine (imo).